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Men and Their Mothers: Challenging Freud's Theory

For at least a century, western psychology has been telling men to reject
closeness with their mothers in order to achieve manhood.

The process was one of Freud's classic theories and a cornerstone of
psychoanalysis. Some say this rejection is a necessary step in the development
of masculine identity.

Now, in the first anthology of its kind, a Berkeley sociologist has brought
together a series of memoirs that call this well-worn theory into question.

Titled "Our Mothers' Spirits: On the Death of Mothers and the Grief
of Men," the book presents 42 writers exploring the bond between mothers
and sons.

Set in the context of a mother's death, the essays include writings by
well-known American male writers such as John Updike, John Cheever and Wallace
Stegner, along with original works by lesser known authors. The stories
cover a range of mother-son relationships, from intimacy and appreciation
to alienation and bitterness. Collectively they expose the extent to which
psychological and spiritual health in men, especially in the later years
of life, depends upon their ability to retrieve the love and closeness they
once felt for their mothers.

"These authors take a giant step beyond the patriarchal assumption
that it is through the histories of their fathers that men define themselves,"
said Professor Emeritus Bob Blauner, the book's editor and a pioneer in
the field of men's studies. Blauner began teaching a Berkeley course on
men and masculinity in 1976, which has become the longest continuing course
on men's lives at a major university.

"Men don't have to psychologically separate from the mother to be
masculine," said Blauner. "Everyone must leave home and become
their own person, but you don't have to over-react and reject the mother."

The extent to which Blauner's point of view breaks with cultural tradition
is hard to over-state.

Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex is a governing metaphor for masculine
development, and the adult man who maintains a close relationship with his
mother runs the risk of being stigmatized as a "mama's boy." Even
academic theorists have been affected by this negative stereotype.

Feminist writers have used Freudian theory in explaining how a boy's
developing gender identity produces separation from the mother (as well
as from a feminine side of personality), and many argue that it lays the
foundation for male dominance. But apart from this negative imagery, little
attention has been paid to the mother-son bond after adolescence.

"We have many more books on mothers and daughters, fathers and sons,
even fathers and daughters, than we have on mothers and sons," said
Blauner.

"There is nothing that honors a life-long bond between them or that
explores the difficulties of this relationship and its potential rewards,"
said Blauner. "This is the first anthology to do that."

The book's essays also suggest that the felt conflict between manhood
and a close loving relationship with the mother is limited to mainstream
white culture. It is not shared, said Blauner, with African-American or
Asian men-at least, not according to these essays.

"Black men-as exemplified in the essays by J. Herman Blake and Henry
Louis Gates-never seem to have shifted identification away from their mothers,"
said Blauner. Yet, they grew up to be effective men in the world."

Blauner's own path back to the mother he had rejected in his 20s took
almost 40 years. A "mama's boy" (the title he uses for his essay),
Blauner had experienced a close, loving relationship with his mother until
he was in his late teens. The effort he put into distancing himself at that
point literally rewrote his memory of the early relationship.

In his 50s, Blauner found a note he had written to his mother when he
was 16, an affectionate, tender note asking his mother to wash his hair
when she got off work.

"It was an eye-opener," said Blauner. "I had not only
'repressed' the memory of the particular event, I had forgotten how long
I had been a mama's boy and, more important, how much in those days I loved
my mother.

"Writing this so many years later," the essay continues,"
I can still feel some of the shame I must have felt at being so closely
tied to my mother, as well as the feeling of emptiness and yearning for
the father who had retreated into the shadows of our family life."

Throughout his 20s, 30s and 40s, Blauner sought identification with his
father. His course on men ignored the mother bond. Like Robert Bly, author
of Iron John, Blauner saw "only the father as the ghost whose loss
has not been acknowledged, whose abandonment of his sons haunts the male
psyche."

Meanwhile, he could barely tolerate more than a day or two in his mother's
company. Quickly irritated by her habits, uncomfortable with her proximity,
viewing her as "not very interesting," Blauner paid perfunctory
visits.

Then, in December 1982, his memory was awakened in a sudden shock. He
learned that his mother was in the intensive care unit with a heart attack.
She might die.

"I started to shake with fright. Then I began to cry, sobbing that
I didn't want her to die because I still needed her; I needed her to be
my mother. For the first time in decades, perhaps in my entire lifetime,
I felt how deeply I loved my mother, acknowledged it without reservation,"
Blauner writes.

For the next three years, until her death in 1986, Blauner saw his mother
many times and it was different-no longer tense or irritating.

His last note to her, written to welcome her home from another visit
to the hospital which she never left, ended with the words: "You're
a wonderful mother and a wonderful person and I love you very much."
He never saw her alive again.

Not all the authors in the book were fortunate enough to experience a
spiritual reunion with their mothers before they died. Some of the mothers
died when their sons were very young; others committed suicide or received
euthanasia. Several of the authors were unable to surpass regret and alienation.
The stories of Cheever, Henry Miller and Nelson Algren are laced with anger,
bitterness and an inability to forgive their mothers.

But most made some measure of a return to psychological identification,
a process that often went on for years, even decades after their mothers'
deaths.

"The journey of return to the mother is a man's mid-life task,"
writes Blauner. "It can take place either before or after her death."